Some might argue that there have always been wars in human history, and therefore it is a completely natural phenomenon. Many arguments can be made as to why this is not the case, but one of the most telling is the prevalence of suicide among veterans. In September 2019, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs published a report stating that at least 60,000 veterans committed suicide between 2008 and 2017. According to statistics, nearly two dozen veterans commit suicide every day in the US, and according to some claims, more Iraq War veterans have committed suicide than died on the battlefield. An extremely high suicide rate can also be observed among veterans of Afghanistan.
Moreover, it is not even necessary to take the US as an example. There is recent data that since November 2020, at least 26 Azerbaijani veterans of the second Karabakh war have committed suicide. In 2018, in the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, one of the representatives of the veterans’ affairs committee reported thousands of suicides among participants in the battles in Donbas. As for Russia, there are data that in 2004, more than 1,000 suicide attempts were recorded among those who had been to Chechnya. Surely, the list of suicides among veterans even only in the countries and conflicts we have considered is far from over. And the list of psychologically traumatized veterans who did not decide to commit suicide will be dozens of times larger. And it is frightening to imagine how many psychiatric losses, besides the direct cases of death in battle, await us on both sides after the end of the military conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
Military experts have long known that the average healthy individual possesses a strong internal resistance to killing, and only less than 2% of people are able to do it easily. But in war, a person is forced to try to suppress their violence inhibitor and commit killings, because otherwise they will not be able to cope with the task at hand, will fail their comrades, and will ultimately contribute to defeat in battle. These two contradictory factors—the necessity to kill and the inability to kill—together are the main cause of psychological trauma on the battlefield. Even among those who were able to kill in war, such traumas are not uncommon, because after realizing what they have done, they cannot come to terms with it and suffer for the rest of their lives. Definitely, war is absolutely unnatural for human beings.
